


Foster-child of Silence and Slow Time

by toujours_nigel



Category: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:18:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2781362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She was a tall strapping mountain girl, born to simplicity but burdened with half-knowledge." Mary Renault, <i>Fire from Heaven</i>, Vintage Books, 2002, pg. 304</p>
            </blockquote>





	Foster-child of Silence and Slow Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fawatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Parrhesia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2790176) by [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/pseuds/filia_noctis). 



> The title is from Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.

She was afraid when the news came. In Orestid country a fort was never idle, but she felt unequal to housing a queen, a prince, and a pack of lordlings all used to the refinements of life in Pella, a place which never failed to make her feel absurd and clumsy. Her sisters-in-law had ordered her to beg her husband to house her in Pella, at court, but three visits in five years had more than sufficed; on one of his rare visits he had kissed her on the ramparts in the harsh light and told her it was like spring water in a swamp to come home to her. Her brother who brought the news came on a morning on a lathered horse he had whipped the entire way through driving snow, snatching rest in a clutch of huts at night and riding only a few hours ahead of the queen’s party at any time.

“She rode as well as any of them,” he confided, gasping over the water she had herself rushed to fetch. “Pick up your skirts, you’re trailing in muck. You’ll have to put them up, we can’t afford to let her think he isn’t her friend in this matter.”

“He is?” She gaped like an untaught girl, and caught herself back. She had been married at twenty, plain and beginning to get old and already half-resigned to settling on a small farm purchased with her dowry, or at her mother’s home until death; he had been greater than she had hoped for in the days she had hoped. Friendship with the queen, terrifying to her, only elevated him.

“Say an ally,” he allowed, and grimaced. “It would shame him to have you know even the rumour, which is all I know. Come on, on your way, they’ll be here before evening if the horses haven’t gone lame.”

A working fort ready to house a phalanx at short order could be made over to a fighting prince and his companions without much work or alteration. The queen gave her far more scope for terror. The house-room was barracks with the sole exception of her own chambers.

“I could give it up for the night,” she said, crossing the threshold and beginning to strip the room of her belongings, going first to the open clothes-press. Pausanias came so rarely and left so neatly that his presence was a momentary shock repeated in the placidity of her life: nothing of his lingered about the bed or the room. “I’ll have the servants strip the bed and make it up again; the prince and his friends can bed down in the barracks: some of the officers’ quarters are empty.”

He came in, further to the window looking out over the fort walls. The barracks lay next the inner wall, clutched together under the ramparts, the officers’ above the rock-cut cellars that served as armoury. “Too far. She won’t be parted from him tonight, not by a spear’s length.”

“There is one other place.” She had hesitated to show it more from a fear of its inadequacy than a desire to keep it secret, but when he nodded approval something in her wilted like a cut rose. Five years ago she had come to this room, up the ladder from the great chamber beneath where the family had been feasted and sat waiting, singing to drown out the anticipated cries. But he had put a hand over her mouth in the moment and stifled himself in a fold of the bearskin that covered them both. Their laughter had carried down, and her sisters-in-law had asked her what they had found to laugh about. It looked well, fitted with clean sheets and with the windows thrown open to the air, and if she found the roughly assembled dormitory below desperately inadequate her brother assured her the prince had slept far worse.

After that it went easier: cooking for a dozen or twenty more mouths, be they voracious young men, was no task, and the servants once instructed went contentedly on in their work. They had had five years to grow accustomed to her, and a lifetime of practice in readying the old fort for the unannounced arrival of its owners and their guests alike. Food was prepared, amphorae liberated from the wine cellar and furs from the close imprisonment of cedar chests. The garrison sent up with its compliments a groom loaded to invisibility with a wolfskin blanket for the prince: the men hunted during the long winters spent penned up in barracks, and sold to merchants in spring whatever they did not keep for themselves; this monstrosity, enough to lap two grown men around, must have taken great skill on part of both the hunter and the women who had cured the skins and stitched them together. Privately, she decided it must have been meant as a bride-gift for some hopeful young officer; for the queen she hunted through her own trousseau for an overmantle of fox fur, crisply autumnal and fringed with the black-tipped tails. It would do well; she had once seen the queen from a great distance sitting among the royal ladies at Pella, and her hair in the sunlight had been the red of the fox-fur in the flickering light of the torches.

When the queen’s party was sighted and her brother went threading through the beeches to welcome them, she gave herself over to the fear that had been kept away all day by the urgency of work. In the polished silver pool of her mirror she looked a flat, frightened thing: always fear, perplexing her mother, who had been too busy running an estate and raising a clutch of children in the absence of a husband to have time for something quite as simple as terror, and earning the mockery and ire of her brothers when they remembered her. If the queen looked around herself with fine disdain or the prince thought his honour too high to become her husband’s guest, if she disappointed her husband so he turned his face from hers when next he came and failed to help him heal what great wound he carried about him: what enemies was the queen an ally against, and who was she seeking with the prince and his companions at her heels in the mountains with winter coming?

Then the muffled hoof-beats coming up the hill rang clear on the flagstones of the courtyard, and there was again no time for fear, which could be held at bay again till the night and the great, lonely bed. She went down with the heart beating double-time in her breast, quietly like a priestess to sacrifice, all she could accomplished.


End file.
